DIOGENES

A pretty phantastick Vision!  But History is against you.

MOSES

And Prophecy.

DIOGENES

And Common Observation.  Look at the World at this moment, and what do we see?  It is as it has always been, and always will be.  So long as it endures, the World will continue to be rul’d by Cajolery, by Injustice, and by Imposture.

MR. LOKE

If that be so, I must take leave to lament the Destiny of the Human Race.

VOLTAIRE’S TRAGEDIES

The historian of Literature is little more than a historian of exploded reputations.  What has he to do with Shakespeare, with Dante, with Sophocles?  Has he entered into the springs of the sea?  Or has he walked in the search of the depth?  The great fixed luminaries of the firmament of Letters dazzle his optic glass; and he can hardly hope to do more than record their presence, and admire their splendours with the eyes of an ordinary mortal.  His business is with the succeeding ages of men, not with all time; but Hyperion might have been written on the morrow of Salamis, and the Odes of Pindar dedicated to George the Fourth.  The literary historian must rove in other hunting grounds.  He is the geologist of literature, whose study lies among the buried strata of forgotten generations, among the fossil remnants of the past.  The great men with whom he must deal are the great men who are no longer great—­mammoths and ichthyosauri kindly preserved to us, among the siftings of so many epochs, by the impartial benignity of Time.  It is for him to unravel the jokes of Erasmus, and to be at home among the platitudes of Cicero.  It is for him to sit up all night with the spectral heroes of Byron; it is for him to exchange innumerable alexandrines with the faded heroines of Voltaire.

The great potentate of the eighteenth century has suffered cruelly indeed at the hands of posterity.  Everyone, it is true, has heard of him; but who has read him?  It is by his name that ye shall know him, and not by his works.  With the exception of his letters, of Candide, of Akakia, and of a few other of his shorter pieces, the vast mass of his productions has been already consigned to oblivion.  How many persons now living have travelled through La Henriade or La Pucelle?  How many have so much as glanced at the imposing volumes of L’Esprit des Moeurs? Zadig and Zaire, Merope and Charles XII. still linger, perhaps, in the schoolroom; but what has become of Oreste, and of Mahomet, and of Alzire? Ou sont les neiges d’antan?